Chapter 11: Trunk-Based Development
One of the capabilities that are highly correlated with accelerated engineering velocity is trunk-based development (also known as TBD). High-performing teams have fewer than three active branches at any time, and their branches have a short lifetime (less than a day) before being merged into the main branch (Forsgren N., Humble, J., and Kim, G. 2018, page 98). Unfortunately, TBD is not a git
workflow but rather a branching model of choice that has been in use since the 80s. It is not well defined and leaves a lot of room for interpretation, especially when it comes to using it with GitHub. Also, I personally find that only moving to a trunk-based workflow does not increase the performance too much. Only large teams with a highly complex workflow that are already stuck in merge hell really have this high impact. For most teams, it is more a combination of different capabilities such as feature flags and continuous integration/continuous deployment...